


Shades of Red

by dimpleforyourthoughts



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, M/M, POV Bucky Barnes, POV Second Person, Pining Bucky: The Real Drug that Kills, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, basically 18k of me puking bucky barnes emotions all over the place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-08
Updated: 2014-07-08
Packaged: 2018-02-07 23:55:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1918953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimpleforyourthoughts/pseuds/dimpleforyourthoughts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are six years old, your name is James Buchanan Barnes, and you think Steve Rogers could teach you a thing or two.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shades of Red

**Author's Note:**

> All I can really say is that this started out as a 500 word drabble and became a monster. And that the MCU timeline for Bucky’s birthday has fucked me up beyond capacity so forgive me if it seems incontinuous. I made diagrams, I swear!
> 
> A big thank you to Jessie for betaing my ramblings and ridiculous metaphors so that they actually make sense. Jess, if you were a superhero your power would be patience.
> 
> And thanks to Katie, for everything else.
> 
> For further shenanigans and stevebucky tears, see my [tumblr](http://dimpleforyourthoughts.tumblr.com)

\

 “There isn’t any me. I'm you. Don't make up a separate me.” –Ernest Hemingway,  _a Farewell to Arms_

* * *

 

 

You are six years old and your name is James Buchanan Barnes. Your Ma insists that your name is Bucky, because James is a name for men, and you are just a boy. But you lost a tooth two weeks ago, and you can whistle through the gap in your bottom teeth as you wait for the new one, so you think you might be a little grown up, a bit of a man, at least.

Your favorite part of day is sunset. You like to take walks through the city and perch on the walls between buildings to watch the sun sink down beneath rooftops and bridges.

(You will one day consider these facts significant to meeting him, that any fewer propensities for sunsets or walks during sunsets would have brought you a completely different fate, and you will shudder at the thought.)

Mickey Gladstone is the school bully of the first grade, simply because he has twenty extra pounds of baby fat that the other kids don’t, so they gravitate towards him, smaller moons to a larger globe. There’s no legitimate reason for why he’s the most popular kid in school, or why he sees fit to pick on the smaller, less globular kids after school. But he does, like clockwork, each day.

You perch on walls so you can see everything, scope out everything, watch Mickey Gladstone bellow like a walrus as he beats in some poor sap’s face. You like the bird’s eye view because you are safe, here, to watch Mickey’s gang herd their newest victim into the corner of the alleyway.

Today they come barreling around the corner, dragging another boy by the scruff—the latest victim—and toss him to the ground, crumpled, bleeding, par for the course for one of Mickey’s sessions.

Truth be told, you usually don’t intercede, because you are six years old and when your Ma threatens to tan your hide if you get blood on your shirt, you believe her. But sometimes you wish you had a slingshot to hurt the bullies with, pebbles at their heads, taking them out one by one. You watch the victim, will him to stay still, lie crumpled long enough so Mickey will get bored and walk away.

But the bleeding boy stands up on shaky legs, and you blink because he is  _bleeding_ , nostrils gushing, eyes purpling and Mickey laughs, pulls the kid up by the lapels of his shirt and raises his fist.

“Can’t get enough, can you Rogers?”

The boy looks completely unafraid, small and bleeding and unafraid, and it’s terrifying to you. In the world of brawling Brooklyn, there is a six year old boy about to get the tar beat out of him, and he couldn’t look more accepting of that fact. His books are scattered on the ground, one of them is a Dick Tracy mystery. You really like Dick Tracy mysteries.

“No, Mickey,” the boy says, “Don’t think I can.”

The boy smears blood on the alley wall when he hits it, a scrawny paintbrush to a brick canvas.

Your name is James Buchanan Barnes and you don’t usually intercede. You are not a fighter.

But you break Mickey Gladstone’s nose and send his cronies down the alleyway howling for their Moms anyhow.

You wrap your arm around the boy, and hobble with him all the way home, because you were taught that it’s rude to invite yourself into other people’s homes and your tiny apartment is closer anyway.

“What’s your name?” You ask, because the boy is bleeding all over your shirt and your Ma is going to kill you, and it seems the polite thing to do.

“Steve Rogers.”

You consider for a moment telling him that your name is James. Because James is a grownup name and you just punched a kid in the face and you think that makes you a little less boy, a little more man. But in the dark of this alleyway, with a boy’s body leaning on your shoulder, you suddenly feel the weight and space of the world around you, you feel all the molecules and Mickey Gladstones of the world that will try to force their way in, take that boy back, and make him bleed. You see it, gaping, an entire world of people and circumstances that will try to break what you have just saved, what you will continue to save, because the boy painted the alleyway in his own blood and didn’t once look ashamed for it. Because no one teaches kids how to stand up to the bullies in the first grade, but this boy had it down pat. Because that’s a kind of ingenuity and pigheadedness that you’ve never before seen in your life, the kind that you know people will fight to extinguish.

“James Buchanan Barnes.” You grin, reaching over to take the boy’s hand and pump it enthusiastically. He smiles, genuinely, and even through the blood on his mouth you think you feel just a little bit taller. “But you can call me Bucky.”

You come home covered in another person’s blood. It will not be last time.

You are not a grownup, yet.

But you think that Steve Rogers could teach you a thing or two. 

\----

You are ten years old and your name is Bucky Barnes.

You’ve got a best friend who says that name like its gospel and your insistent pursuit of the title James fell by the wayside the exact moment that Steve Rogers told you he liked Bucky better anyhow.

You spend any and all time that you can with Steve, because without actual reason or rhyme, Steve is the most interesting person in your life and you would happily forget anyone else and all else if it meant that you got to keep him. He is made up of paper skin and bird bones that tear and break too easily, and the only times he speaks up are when he’s about to get beat down.

There is a part of Steve Rogers that makes you still, like the very presence of him in your life is a hand to the shoulder, grounding, comforting. You do not know how else to describe it because you yourself are a force of constant motion, jiggling legs and twitching smiles, always moving, always racing the boys on the playground because you are the fastest and when you go, you fly. Your Ma calls it chutzpah and your teacher calls it rowdiness and Steve calls it idiocy and you love that his definition always sounds the fondest. Whatever it is, it means you don’t fit, hyper and quick to anger just as you are to happiness, a paddle ball with no direction.

You are something of a phenomenon in that you are only ever good when Steve is there to make you better. Which is perfect, because Steve is there always and people like your mother and your teachers love him. People tolerate you, adore and respect and relate to you, but they love Steve, the quiet boy with polite manners and soft eyes, and that’s perfectly okay, because you love Steve too.

You do not understand the full implications of that statement, you only know that it is true in the way that you have gotten into twenty six fights in the last four years and they’ve all been for him. 

There is something under your skin that makes you restless, never satisfied, but Steve is your best friend and he only ever placates that edge in you. So with him, you are good.

You never have to learn what you are like ‘without him’ until the week Steve gets sick, two weeks after Christmas. Sickness and Steve have gone hand in hand pretty much up from day one, perpetual colds or other basic ailments. Winters are always the worst—always your least favorite months of the year for the rattle of breath and pallor of skin they bring—but up until this point Steve has trucked through rather admirably. But you show up one morning to play and Mrs. Rogers open the door. She always smiles when she sees you, but she is not smiling now.

“Can Stevie come out to play?”

Stevie is sick, Mrs. Rogers says, very very sick. Which, yes, you know Steve is sick. Steve is always sick. But Mrs. Rogers says she doesn’t want you to get sick too, and to go home to your mother, and tell her she said hello.

You could, you should, go home. But Christmas was ten days ago, and you got that slingshot you had always wanted. You had wanted to show Steve, spend the day shooting at random bits of trash on the sidewalk, count the number of times you could make Steve laugh or smile. But Steve is Very Very Sick, so you wander streets and corners, just as you did before you had a best friend.

 _Crunch crunch crunch_  goes the snow at your feet as you trek,  _woosh_  goes the wind chapping your ears and  _ping_  goes the sound of your slingshot as you send pebbles flying in every which direction, not practicing aim and purpose to the shots as much as you are simply shooting. Targets are of no consequence when the world is white and your best friend isn’t around. Control is not something you require.

Amidst the corner of Camden Street you spot a male cardinal, red and singing in the late winter, a melody containing two upwards pitched whistles and a series of chattered off syllables. The bare branches of a dead tree cradle it, shield it from the public eye, but you crawl up on a wall and listen, watch, anyhow.

It is very small, bright like a flower, but small. When you go to make the shot, it’s almost an afterthought, a joke. You haven’t been able to hit any of the targets you’d been shooting at, not dangling pants on clotheslines, nor trashcans nor street signs. You weigh the small stone in your palm as you lie flat on the wall, belly to cold brick, and you think you’ll shoot just off kilter enough to scare the bird, watch it take off in a flurry of ruby into dimming skies.

It’s just a game, like so many things are to you. You feel the elastic stretch of the slingshot under the resistance of your fingertips; anticipatory, reckless.

You shoot, you don’t even bother to aim.

Yet the bird falls, cut off mid-song, red body on white snow. Its neck is bent, though it does not bleed.

There will be no songs for it to sing, not anymore.

Your mind struggles for a moment to make the connection between visual and concept. Things die, you know this. People like Steve’s Dad and your Aunt Catherine have died, tucked away in the recesses of the earth. But you were too young to remember, you were not there for the funerals in a way that stuck with you. But you are here for this death, the first death. Death which you have caused.

You look down at your hands. They are clean to your eyes, yet they do not feel clean. You do not feel clean.

You tumble off the wall to vomit, hands and knees sliding and cutting on sleet covered pavement. This will be the first time you have ever hated yourself, have wanted to remove flesh from bone and remake the mistakes you have carved out in fate. You are so sorry, so so sorry, but there is no one to scold you, punish you for your crime, for the cardinal had died quiet, and Bucky Barnes doesn’t get into trouble. Bucky Barnes is a good kid, after all.

So you bury the bird under the tree you knocked it down from. Shame fills you like boiling water, spilling hot over your cheeks and pooling in your stomach. Your shame, your fault, your death. And in this moment you are a loose cannon, this weird in-between state where you once again find yourself trying to fill shoes that were never meant to fit you, responsibilities and burdens that stretch beyond your ten years of age and wisdom. You are out of place in that are trying to be a name that sounds like gospel on your best friend’s lips, but it is not a name that you have earned, not one that fits.

Because at the end of the day, slingshots and restlessness aside, you are just a boy, and you have just killed. You are not a murderer, but here you are, burying your first body.

The dead of winter creeps down your throat like a gag. You make yourself sick.

And wounded as you are by your own stupid gall and your own stupid restlessness, you have but one place to go. So you crawl and clamber over ice cold railings up to the seventh floor of a tiny cramped building that you know like the back of your hand and you roll onto the floor of your best friend’s bedroom through the back window, covered in snow and tears.

“Bucky?”

Steve is shivering and bundled up in blankets, but he smiles wide at you. The moonlight that spilled in the window with you lets you seem him plain as day. It’s only been a few days since you’ve last seen him, but a few days of sick in Steve Rogers’ world is enough to invoke catastrophic appearance alterations. He looks like a baby bird that’s fallen straight from the tree, cheeks cardinal red with fever flush, body lying at a broken angle on the bed, shaking.

He looks like you feel, but you don’t know how to say that in words that don’t make you sound like a sissy, so you whisper. “Two days without me and you’re already falling apart, Rogers, sheesh.”

When he wheezes a cough in response, it sounds like a twittering song.

It has occurred to you before that Steve could get hurt, because you have seen him get hurt and you have saved him from getting hurt. But it has never occurred to you that Steve might die, that one day you will wake up living and breathing in a world where he is not. That one day there will be another body and it will be his, that he will fall from his tree and lie broken, on the ground.

And you know that life is sacred but you would rather lose yours than have to bury your best friend.

So you build him a nest.

You forge a tent of blankets and sweaters from the linen closet; Mrs. Rogers isn’t home, but you get the feeling she won’t mind. You balance chairs and tables to equally prop the tent around, a teepee surrounding your feverish best friend.

Steve sniffles, blinking, voice crackly with illness, “Buck, what’re ya doing?”

“You’re freezing.” You say, like that’s all the explanation needed. “Quit your complaining and say ‘Thanks, Bucky.’”

“Thanks,  _Mom_.” Steve rolls his eyes, but he shivers less with each moment you spend under the canvas of quilts.

He’s watching you, you’re aware, even as you remove your jacket and your gloves, can probably tell that something is wrong. But you simply press your boy body to his bird body in response to his unasked questions, and rub his icicle fingers between your killer’s hands. He squirms and you sigh and he glares and you smile and when his eyes drift closed and his sweaty head falls on your shoulder you realize that this, right here, seems to be the only time and place where you seem to fit correctly.

“I shot a bird today,” you whisper in the dark. Killing that cardinal had dirtied your hands, and you feel a sudden urge to scrub them raw. You watch shadows flicker over Steve’s face, death itself pushing and prodding over his cheekbones, his eyelids, his nose, and you suddenly think, what if Steve dies? What if Steve dies? You don’t want to imagine what you might become, who you might become. The cardinal was a stranger. But Steve, Steve is... “It was so stupid. I didn’t mean to kill it, I was just—”

Steve’s breath rattles in his lungs against your shoulder. If Steve dies…

No. You grind your molars together, blinking away tears and swallowing back panic. If Steve  _lives_.  _When_  Steve lives, you think, you swear, under your breath, when Steve lives you won’t ever take a life again, you won’t ever hurt an innocent living thing, you won’t ever kill. Never never never.

Frail fingers close around yours in the darkness, and though you thought he was sleeping, you grip tight like his life—and your life, because of course they are one and the same—depends on it.

 You will not ever let go.

(You will, one day.)

You blink back more shame and stare up at a tent ceiling, apologizing for your body, pleading forgiveness for your sins to a God you’re not sure you believe in. It will not be the last time.

\----

You are fourteen years old and your name is many things, but you think it’s most suited when you’re called Jerk.

Because you  _are_  a jerk. You are hot and angry and awkward as summer cracks you open to drip out and fry like an egg on the pan. You sizzle, innards exposed to the world, and you want to crawl out of your own skin and tear the world in half.

Your body becomes something half formed, a weird cocoon that is unfamiliar and unwarranted. You eat like a horse and even after all that you feel malnourished, parched, and all forms of hungry in between. Your body is a field, hair springing up on skin you once knew to be bare, parts of you becoming bigger, growing outwards. You are less the loud mouthed scrawny kid known for a fast punch and more the cocky bastard known for brute force, coiled muscle once hidden in the lankiness of your frame, now prominent. You grow, and people look differently at you. Girls don’t just giggle when you smile or show off, they stare. You are no longer ‘cute’ to Mama, you are ‘handsome’. A voice once chipper and pitched high is now throaty, like the men who come out of the factories sometimes sound after a workday. Your insides refuse to fit beneath your skin because you are constantly shifting about. Growing, metamorphosing, you love it, sometimes.

You hate it, others.

Steve started drawing when you started growing, and it seems the more time you spend growing the more he draws, sketches and doodles on a notepad that he never lets you look at but always leaves lying around; careless, trustful.

Steve grows too, but the rest of the world is blind to that particular sunspot in your summer.

Although the world may not see Steve, the world does love Steve, you make sure of it. You are top of the class, but teachers rave about Steve’s artistic ability, praise his manners and obedience, his punctuality. Your mother pecks your cheek every day before you leave for school, but it is Steve she forces to try all her baked goods and soups, as if by secretly spoon feeding him she will make up for the knobs of his knees, the concave of his stomach. And you do not feel jealous for these simple compromises of affection because you feel an almost bellicose insistence for people to see in Steve all that you see. It makes you unbearably frustrated that they don’t see it, continue to remain ignorant simply because Steve lacks your brawn and your chameleon ability to be anyone you want to be (though you know, there isn’t anyone you’d rather be more than Steve’s Best Friend). You feel sometimes as if you are bearing a flag, a torch, for Steve Rogers, waving it proudly and shouting “Look at this! This is amazing! Do you see? Do you see how wonderful this is?”

But the world continues to be ignorant, and cruel.

Susan Snipes celebrates her fifteenth birthday—a party on Coney Island, with Ferris wheels and cotton candy and bumper carts—and invites most everyone in the class, passing out invitations to all of her girlfriends and most of the boys. She saunters over to your desk and winks when she hands you your invitation.

“Limited seats in the cars, sorry Steve.” She says, not even looking at Steve when she speaks to him, attention rapt on you.

You stare at the envelope in your hands, and notice that Steve has shrunk into himself next to you. He has always liked Susan, always let her borrow pencils from him, and has only ever smiled at her. But now he looks miserable, hurt. Steve may be a scrapper, come away from most days with bloody noses like they’re a routine for how often he tells off bullies, but he’s got nothing to scrap for in this situation. It’s just another person who doesn’t see him, and he’s never been good at fighting that.

“So, coming to my party or not?” Susan asks, batting her eyelashes and she is pretty and she is sweet and you think she’d let you kiss her if you tried.

‘Fuck’ is a beautiful word, you have learned, simply because it is the only word in the English language that seems to define how you feel at this point in your life, unsure of everything and angry for it. ‘Fuck’ is a word that would get you a mouthful of soap if Ma ever heard it, ‘fuck’ is a word that you’ve practiced under your breath, with trepidation, testing out the bitten F to the exhaled U to the hard edged CK in the back of your throat. 

‘Fuck’ is just one of the many words you use on Susan Snipes before grabbing Steve’s arm and hauling him after you.

Fuck Susan. Fuck them all. You seethe and you swear all the way to your apartment and it’s not until you let go of Steve and realize that he’s laughing his head off that you stop, deflated mid-tantrum.

“See if you ever get invited to a party again.” Steve says between wheezes. “Gosh, the look on her face, I thought she was going to wet herself when you started hollerin.”

You blink, cowed. “I wasn’t  _hollerin_.”

“That was a hollerin’ if I’ve ever heard one. We should tell your Ma about it. She’d be so proud she’d probably cry, like mother like son…”

And you are still thinking fuck the world but Steve’s smile is an invisible needle and like a popped balloon, you rebound from your anger, letting him in the front door and rolling your eyes. “Yeah well, Susan had it coming. Anyone who doesn’t think that Barnes and Rogers are a package deal isn’t anyone I want to be hanging around with anyhow.”

He shakes his head like you are something else, and goes to curl up in the window with his drawing utensils.

When it comes down to it—and you will never admit this because it is selfish and it is guilty and it is easily the worst part of yourself—you are almost grateful for the world’s blind eye. You should feel bad for hogging Steve from the rest of the world, but Steve has always passed out smiles like they were candy and now he saves them just for you, and though you should feel stingy or stifled by that fact, you never seem to mind. Because if it is you he chooses to spend his time with, if it is your kitchen window that he perches in with his sketch pad and pencils, if it is you that he’ll shove and play-fight with on hot summer evenings, you will not complain, not one bit.

You will—if anything—certainly thank your lucky stars for Steve Rogers’ own blindness to how absolutely good-for-nothing you really are.

The kitchen is bathed in humid air and sunlight, too hot to be comfortable, so the two of you strip off your shirts and sprawl in the afternoon heat, listless. Bowls and bowls of your Ma’s raspberries from the garden are on the counter, flour and other ingredients alongside, probably for pies and cobblers. Your stomach growls.

“Didn’t you just eat?” Steve asks wryly.

“Shaddup,” you say.

You take up your usual posts on afternoons, Steve drawing, you whittling away at a stick you grabbed in the alleyways with your knife.

Steve can create, but you just cut.

The snick of the knife on wood and the sound of shavings dropping to the ground fill the room, and you watch Steve’s small hands move over the paper, one hand drawing the other erasing as he goes.

Steve is tall. Susan Snipes might need glasses, but even when Steve curls, you see how big he is, or rather, how big he will be one day. The very presence of him is like a tree in that it grows upwards and outwards, fills doorframes that he lingers in, fits the clothes that drape on him. He’s bigger, in that he’s made of what other people seem to lack in your eyes.

For as breakable and weak as Steve may be physically, there is a boat load of strength in that heart of his. You tell people—you tell Steve, really—that one day he’s going to save the world, and you believe it. You just wish that he could believe it to.

Slender wrists move in quick and calculated motions, and the wrinkle of concentration on his forehead almost makes him look like an old man. “You could have gone, you know. I wouldn’t have minded.”

And this, you do know. But you also know that anything you do is only half the fun when Steve isn’t there with you.

“And miss another afternoon of watching you draw stick figures in the kitchen? Not a chance.”

Steve doesn’t respond, just frowns at his sketchbook, pencil making looping sweeps. It bothers him, that you forgo everyone else, as if choosing Steve is some big sacrifice of companionship. It’s unbearably frustrating, knowing how he feels about himself in regard to you. You feel its your job to grab those slender wrists and insist ‘just wait Stevie you’ll see one day, they’ll all see’, drill it into his head until he believes it. 

But you are a Jerk. Summer has turned you into something hot and volatile, and you no longer know how to speak in words that are not a defense in some offhand way. You converse in jabs and parries, and you feel it would be unwise to lower your weapon now. So you’ll save your confessions of hopes and wishes for moments of darkness, where you can at least pretend that he is asleep.

 “You gonna show me all those secret sketches you’ve got of me?”

“Fuck off,” Steve says coolly.

Laughter bursts past your lips into the open space around you. You shouldn’t have been surprised, Steve taught you that word after all.

He’s talented, naturally, but he’s also shy as all hell when it comes to showing you anything that he’s working on.

“Guess I’ll just have to steal them, then.”

You stand and walk over, loving every second of him trying to ignore you and trying to pretend he doesn’t give a care that you’re coming over to pester him. When he hitches his knees up and tucks the sketchbook away, you lean forward, your hands on his thighs, invading his personal space.

He flushes, staring defiantly up. He’s not afraid of you. You think he might be the only kid in this whole world who isn’t.

“’M not showing you.”

“C’mon Stevie….”

“Mind your own beeswax!”

When you ruffle the smooth part in his hair, he slaps your hand away, and when you knuckle his scalp the pencils clatter to the floor as he springs up, ready for a fight, always ready for a fight. Not that Steve goes looking for trouble—that has, and always will be, your job—but rather that he refuses to back down when someone challenges him. He never knows how to walk away. Will he ever learn how to walk away?

Will there ever be a fight Steve Rogers will back down from?

(You will ask yourself this for years. By the time you know the answer; you will have forgotten the question.)

You make a snatch for the sketchbook, and he tackles you to the floor, snarling like a wildcat. Its play, and the two of you tussle until you’ve got him pinned against the counter, one arm twisted behind his back.

“Say Uncle, Stevie!”

“Get off!”

“Not till I see what you’re drawing. Or you say Uncle. What’d you draw, huh, naked girls? Did you draw naughty bits, Stevie Boy?”

He scrabbles for purchase, sending silverware and bowls clattering in his effort to gain leverage, and your laughter telegraphs through both of your bodies.

His fist comes up, expected, but it opens at the last second to slap raspberries across your face with a wet  _splat_  that causes you to loosen your grip long enough that he can squirm out, fists up in the warm space of the kitchen.

“Oh,” you grapple for the bowl of raspberries, grinning, rolling your shoulders and suddenly appreciating the advantage of your height over Steve, loving how easy it will be to make him pay, “You are gonna get it.”

The kitchen is a carnage site in the midst of the raspberry war. You pin him to the floor time and time again, but he always seems to know how to get out at the last moment, knows by heart the points of weakness in your body that are not as invincible as you have come to believe you are. He pokes and pinches and tickles and the two of you pelt raspberries like they’re bullets, building trenches from the dining room table and chairs, loading the ammo in your pockets. The raspberries end up in your hair and up your nose, sweet flavor causing you to lick your lips even as you swear you’re going to strangle that punk for making such a mess.

You press him into the tile, naked chest bracketing his naked back as red smears on his skin and on his hair and by the time your Ma comes in to scold you both, the kitchen looks like a murder scene straight out of a Detective novel.

Steve ducks his head, apologetic to your mother, scratching at the back of his head, eager to please and suddenly  _so_ innocent. You glare at him, kiss-ass, and your eye catches on a single raspberry clinging to the jutting wing of his shoulder blade.

You wait until your mother leaves the room, and you lean forward. It feels only natural, and he is such a  _punk_  so you lick the raspberry clear off his shoulder, biting hard at the last second, making sure to leave an imprint of your teeth as he shouts in pain and clocks you over the head with artist’s hands.

The two of you spend hours cleaning up the kitchen, and you smell like sweat and feel like the crushed berries smeared all over the floor. And it’s still somehow the best part of your day, this space and these moments and Steve’s glares. You try not to give that feeling too much thought.

You curl up in one bed together that night, because the floor is hard and if you opt to sleep there, you know Steve will join you, bed be damned.

So you jab him in the ribs and he kicks your shins and you fall asleep murmuring insults into the pillows.

When you wake up, you know immediately that something is wrong. Your skin feels taut like a drum, prickly and hot, night shirt glued to your back with cold sweat, berry mixed with salt tang. Mouth fuzzy, eyes open, wondering what the hell just happened.

There is something between the V of your thighs and when you sit up; a pressure, insistent, uncomfortable. You have heard the older boys on the playground whisper about this, swap stories about Stiffies like they’re battle scars.

You know what this is; it is not unbeknownst to you, just another uncomfortable stepping stone you must clamber past. It is not until you look over your shoulder that you realize why, and you feel as if you are going to throw up.

You look over at Steve, normally a comfort amidst sleepless nights and uncomfortable dreams. But what you feel when you see your best friend’s body, half-naked and curled around himself, is not comfort. It is yearning, aching,  _wanting._ You are barely aware of how your own body works, how it would work with other bodies, but you know in your gut that you want to put your mouth on Steve Rogers. What you would do with that mouth is unclear, terrifying, but you also know—suddenly and violently; the crack of thunder signaling torrential summer storms—that it has everything to do with the cluster of freckles across the expanse of his bony shoulders, with the mountains of his spine, with the remaining spatter of raspberry at the nape of his neck.

He makes a half formed noise in his throat, mid-sleep, and you are a sudden and slipshod mess of frantic desires and sickened realizations that seal your mouth shut, cut off your windpipe, restrict any circulation that isn’t headed straight for South. 

This is an assault that your mind cannot control out of terror or self loathing, for it lies in your blood. It not a thing you can physically remove or grapple with. You cannot protect Steve from this, because this is not a bully to beat or scare off, this is not a cold wintery night you can build a shelter from, this is you.

 You are the worst most dangerous thing for Steve Rogers at this moment in time, and you are also the only thing he’s got, the only thing he wants around.

It’s just not the same want that you yourself reciprocate.

Your body has betrayed you. It will not be the last time.

\----

You are eighteen years old and your name is Jerk Barnes, and you want.

You want Steve Rogers. You want him so bad you’ll stitch your mouth closed and sew your hands to your pockets so you don’t do something to scare him away. You want him so bad you’ll fake all the enthusiasm you want for dames, with their soft skin and full lips. You’ll date girls, dance with girls, kiss girls, make them want you so bad they sigh with it, and you’ll do it all while juggling that with the fact that you still want your best friend.

You are in a skin that looks good and feels fine, but want turns you inside out, and you feel that life has played a cruel joke on you, making you good looking, smart, charming, but having all of those attributes mean next to nothing where they really count. Where you could really use them. And so you careen about, a Catherine Wheel spiraling out of control in night skies; pretty, burning out into smoke and vapor.

Mrs. Rogers passes away in the bloom of spring, and it is upon your insistence that you and Steve move in together in order to scrape by, pushing your combined salaries to pay rent in a ramshackle room in Brooklyn. You tell him, after the funeral, that till the end of the line is where you’ll go, and you mean it, for you see no future that doesn’t have him in it. The two of you rule the world in your unheated palace on the second floor of an apartment building on minimum wage. You are the kings of condensed milk and watery soup, of huddling under blankets for warmth, propped up on your throne of being somebodies to each other in a world where everybody thinks you’re nobodies.

The apartment is something that is yours, you make it so. Tacking up your favorite comics on the walls, clothes lines in the kitchen, toothbrushes in a mug by the sink. Your tiny wash bin is barely enough to place a single foot in. You fill a wooden crate with worn and torn books, spend your daily wages every other Friday just so you can add to the collection. You spend the more frigid nights reading through your library instead of going out dancing to pass the time, and you’re pretty sure you know every book in the library front to back by this point, but it is yours and Steve’s, and being able to call something not only yours, but  _ours_  makes you almost sick with how satisfying it feels.

Work is something you can throw yourself into in the midst of your want, lifting lumber in a city with grey skies and nameless men who are already worn thin. The physical labor wears you out, so you can come home to Steve and not worry that you’re too amped up to resist temptation. You come home dirty, sweaty, blackened, sometimes bleeding.

It’s nearing winter, so Steve works in late afternoons when the sun surfaces, and is always home to greet you in the evenings, his breath faltering but his eyes bright whenever they settle on you.

You come home one day with a cut along your forearm, barely a scratch save for how it can’t seem to stop bleeding. You got foolish, your hands slipped, spent one too many minutes pondering over daydreams involving a skinny boy in a dark room.

“What’d you do  _now_?” He rises, copy of  _A Farewell to Arms_  falling with a thud to the gritty tile of your tiny kitchen. He directs you in soft footfalls to the counter and grabs your arm, exasperated.

“This is going to need stitches.” He says after barely a moment’s inspection.

“Good thing you’ve got the steady hands.” You grin around a mouthful of exhaustion.

You don’t have two pennies to rub together but he takes your one bottle of alcohol regardless, giving you a swig for good measure before pouring it, clear and stinging, like absolution, over your bleeding gash. Hissing through your teeth, you laugh.

The pain feels good. Better than most things you feel these days.

“Make yourself useful.” He picks up the book from the floor and pushes it into your unwounded hand. “Since you made me lose my spot. Page three hundred and four.”

There is no arguing when Steve is playing nurse, and you set about the ritual of reading, voice pitched low so the landlord won’t issue a noise complaint. Steve often reads aloud when you patch his wounds, but where he’s got the love for the words, you’ve got the voice, weaving the tale with melody and charm to boot.

But there’s no bluster to put on in this cramped kitchen, not a single soul you’ll be able to charm, so you hold one arm out as he threads a needle through your skin, wincing on commas and periods, but managing to keep your voice steady as you read. Steve hates it when you mess up the good parts. You keep your voice gentle, and it feels somehow, like a story you’ve read before.

_“‘Maybe…you’ll fall in love with me all over again.’_

_‘Hell,’ I said, ‘I love you enough now.’”_

You glance away momentarily, Steve’s fingers smoothing iodine over your skin, brown liquid and blood mixing together. He wipes it off forcefully with a dishcloth, and the sight of him removing you from his hands hurts to watch, so you glance back to the page.

_“ ‘What do you want to do? Ruin me?’_

_‘Yes. I want to ruin you.’_

_‘Good,’ I said, ‘That’s what I want too.’”_

Steve patches your cut with steady hands, same as always. His hands reach upwards once he’s finished, smoothing out your hair, fingers coming away with soot and grease on the whorls of skin. It’s a comforting gesture, no different than when he bumps your shoulder as you walk down the street together, or folds his knees to touch yours when you sleep front to front.

And you want to ruin him for it.

“You’re filthy,” he says with humor, and filthy you are, the word ‘SINNER’ scratched out on your skin in angry red letters like fresh cuts, you are filthy in how desire thwarts common decency and sense time and time again, filthy in how you want to wreck Steve, worship and revere and absolutely wreck him.

“But I still call first bath,” Steve quips, turning and lifting his shirt over his head, sight of bare skin smacking your breath from your lungs.

You have considered before, that you could get used to a lifetime of this. One room one bathtub one bed. This; coming home to Steve each evening, bringing home food, ruling your throne and not giving a singular shit about anyone else in the goddamn world. This; Steve cleaning up your cuts and you watching his back, he the king, you the lion-hearted knight.

But you don’t think you’ll be able to take another night of Steve like  _this_ ; naked and unaware of how you’d punch a thousand Mickey Gladstones, shoot down a thousand cardinals, wreck thousands of kitchens, just to have him want you back.

Because, you think, this whole thing wouldn’t be wrong, if he wanted it too. It wouldn’t. You’re eighteen and God no longer exists to a boy of your world experience, but you don’t think any righteous God would condemn something that should,  _would_  feel so perfect to you.

It wouldn’t be wrong if Steve wanted to, because Steve is good and Steve only ever wants for things that are good. But he doesn’t and it isn’t. You are a sinner and you are going to hell for the way you watch the slant of his flanks as he strips down, the notches of his hips above pants that have always fit too loose.

No, you are not going to hell. This  _is_  hell, you arrived long before you even realized where you were. 

 _A Farewell to Arms_  slaps to the tile for a second time. When you lift it, staring at anything but the angles of Steve, you notice one of his penciled notations, a circling around one particular sentence amongst dog eared pages and a cracked spine.

_“My life used to be full of everything. Now, if you aren’t with me, I haven’t a thing in the world.”_

“Buck, you alright? You look real pale...how long were you bleeding for?” Steve trusts you more than anyone, but he should be running.

You, you should be running.

You have seen him naked before. You have seen Steve Rogers naked almost every week for your whole life, it feels. There is no shame between the two of you, and why should there be?

But every time there was nakedness, it was a wall away from your mother, or his mother, or in the locker room amidst countless other boys your age. You were never alone like this, Steve looking up at you, confused, mouth open on the end of his question.

You could once depend on a world where you fit in a bed with Steve Rogers, where the world and its troubles would not be small enough to fit in there with the two of you. But the troubles find themselves in your bed anyway, and you have learned by now that two’s company, but three’s a crowd.

You think about how this bed would creak with your bodies, how his skin would feel against yours, how he would taste on your mouth, lust shining in overblown pupils and heat of pulse.

You can’t do this. It hits you like a sucker punch.

You are not going to be able to live a life like this, always inches away from temptation, without acting on impulse. Self-control has never been your strength. You cannot protect Steve when all you want to do is ruin him.

So you choose, you force yourself, to box yourself away and you protect him in the best way you can.

“Need another drink.” You grab your coat, and swing out of the apartment feeling drunk on heat, even in the cool night air.

And though he stays behind, Steve follows you onto the street, dogging your shadow, an invisible tangible thing always just out of reach. You’ll never be rid of him, a drug that pumps through your veins, thick smoke that clings to your skin. He lives and blossoms in your heart like a bruise, hurting more and more each time you touch it.

But Steve is not something you are allowed to touch. Not in the ways that matter most.

You need to get rid of him, shed this childish fantasy of a boy who wants another boy, because if there’s anything this world has taught you, fantasies are for fools, and happy endings were never yours to keep in the first place.

(Happy endings are just one of many things that you will find were never yours, you will know this soon enough.)

You are Bucky Barnes and you are handsome and you know how to make toes curl with a flash of your smile. You could give a shit about any of the dames in the random dance hall that you walk into, but you still speak soft and hold doors open, because you are a gentlemen, because Steve would think badly of you if you were anything but.

He’s with you, even in the times you least want him to be.

You are the punchline to a joke. A guy walks into a bar looking for a dame but hungry for his best friend.

So you fuck a girl on a tiny creaky mattress until she’s moaning your name and sweating on the sheets, wet slap of skin making you shiver with revulsion at yourself. She’s absolutely beautiful, a real looker, and you fuck her despite the fact that you’ve never once done this before, never once even felt inclined. You roll your head into her shoulder as you snap your hips and feel her shudder, and if you keep both eyes closed you can imagine freckles scattered across a bonier build. You fuck a girl and you treat her so good, tell her that you’re going to make it so good, that she’ll never need anyone else, never need another but you.

You hope to god that her name happens to be Stella or Evie; something like that.

When you come it’s with cheeks flushed, lipstick smeared on your collarbone like blood, and something breaking in your chest, desperate and futile and almost hopeful that this will be enough to fix everything. She clenches around you and you listen as her heart flutters against the cage of your sternum and you wait to see if your beats will synchronize. You are hardly surprised, resigned, to find they do not: the wrong cadence, the wrong notes, the wrong songbird. 

You walk home smelling like someone else’s body. You are cocky and braggy and you are everything he needs you to be and when he smiles, rolls his eyes, says, “Yeah, whatever, go wash up you letch” you think that this is simultaneously the worst thing you have ever done for you, but also the best for him.

You marry the words ‘Good for Steve’ and ‘Self Destruction’ until they are one and the same thing and you tell yourself that as long as Steve is happy, the blows you put in your own body will not matter.

 It will not be the last time.

\----

You are twenty five years old, your name is Sergeant Bucky Barnes and you are in love with violence.

You are in love with violence, and you like that you can say that because violence is many things. The dictionary defines violence as strength of emotion, or an unpleasant or destructive natural force, but it is so much more than that to you. Violence is the color of a woman’s lipstick, bright and marking up your neck, violence is a warm gun and a cocky smile. Violence is a boy who was born into this world fighting fighting fighting and will probably leave this world fighting fighting fighting. You crave violence like clean air and cold water because it is instantaneous gratification, settles the itch of want in your stomach, keeping it a bay just a little longer.

And you love violence most because no matter how much and how fast you run it never seems to leave you. You are sure in this fact, the same way you are sure your life is marked in crimsons and pinks and burgundies, bursting like fireworks on the fourth of July.

Violence is not a thing you can physically be, but it is within itself something that you love. 

The day Steve had suggested the two of you enlist was a blessing in disguise. He’d been so excited, jittery and driven, finally a cause he could rise to. And you had gone along to placate him. You were a couple of lanky kids from Brooklyn, living off of food scraps and factory wages. You were no good for the war front, and that was just fine with you.

Steve hadn’t made it past the height and weight measurements. You were called to report to the induction center at o-seven hundred two weeks from that day.

Steve had taken you out and gotten you drunk in celebration. You pretended to be too far gone from Vodka and he pretended to be pleased as all get out that you were going off to war. It was a brilliant performance on both your parts, pretend pride and patriotism, but when Steve’s shoulders quietly shook beside you in bed that night, you damn near rushed back to the Enlistment station and insisted that there must have been some mistake, you couldn’t go, you could never go, you didn’t belong on the battlefield, you weren’t a soldier, you weren’t a fighter, you have never been a fighter…

Men like Steve, they are the fighters. You are just the loose cannon, always have been. A weapon, cocked pistol just waiting for the trigger to be pressed.

(You will think, years after the fact: they must have known when they found your body in the snow that you were meant for this, born for this, that all it would take was a little coaxing.)

You are not a fighter, but Uncle Sam is handing you a gun, pointing you east and telling you to shoot that is an order Sergeant. So you do.

War is without a doubt the worst thing that has ever happened to you. Yet now that you are here, you love the violence that comes with war, simply because it gives you purpose. Violence puts spark in your eye and spring in your step. Violence wears you out so you sleep at night and violence makes sure you eat a well balanced meal and that your clothes are always clean.

And you can get behind this violence because it is productive,  _good_. Putting bullets in the enemies’ brains is a better use of you. If you are to be a weapon, at least you can destroy something that deserves to be destroyed. The alternative is your worst nightmare, so you cling to violence like it’s your raft, adrift in an ocean of blood.

You are on post at Camp McCoy for twenty weeks, and you are a grunt, a maggot that crawls through mud and climbs fences and fires at moving targets. You are squared away, taught to disassemble and reassemble things for killing. Body on autopilot, a glorious hum in your veins. You are forced to always move and it is for the first time in your life that no one is restricting you, the Pandora’s box in your chest kicked wide open, unleashed. So you run and you shoot and you burn off that excess energy that never ran out when you were a kid, high off your own fire. You used to save that fire for scrabbles in alleyways and mouthing off to pretty girls who dared hurt Steve, but now you are without him, trained to kill Nazis just as easily as tying your shoes.

Violence strips you of the small remainder of your youth, of baby fat and of Brooklyn, so that you look no different from your fellow soldiers. You are one in a million of the Army Ground Forces, and that anonymity, that insignificance tastes like victory already. You are special to no one in this world of synchronized unit drills and honed brutality, you have no one to curl next to at night, no one you have to worry extra about, no brawls that aren’t for good ole Lady Liberty.

You’d almost consider it peaceful, if you weren’t so homesick.

Steve writes you letters, they pour in with packages for the other men of your rank, but in double the quantity, and triple the length. You picture it in your head; play out the fantasy in your weakest of moments, after your tent mates have drifted to sleep, once you’ve taken off your Sniper’s eye for the day. You imagine Steve doing nothing but sitting out at the cramped kitchen table writing you letter after letter, laughing when he writes in a jibe at you, frowning when he signs off, always reluctant, seemingly interrupted by having to go to work, or needing to sleep, never voluntarily saying goodbye. You barely have time to write back with all the running into the ground that you do, short notes here and there.

You miss him like hell, but missing Steve is not the same as the way Steve misses you, and for that reason, you belong here. You belong on the front lines with a gun in your hand and orders to kill. When you are deployed, you will run off to war with a smile plastered on your face. For you are America’s Golden Boy, a hero, a man doing his service to his country.

You are not an innocent lamb being led to the slaughter, but a pig. A selfish and greedy pig who wants more than what he has, who shouldn’t want yet wants endlessly, needlessly, tirelessly.

You plan to fight like hell to get back to Steve, or die trying. Though you believe you belong out there on the battlefield, you have no desire to die there. You may be in love with violence, the act of unhinged life and desire and sudden action, but underneath that is your want. And what you want is a kid from Brooklyn with asthma and brittle bones; as long as he’s alive, then so will you be, till the end till the end till the end.

If you do die—and you do consider it, dream through crystal balls that predict every bloody outcome you may have—you can only hope that if it happens (when it happens) that it will be quick. A bullet to the head. A grenade, maybe. For you have dealt with long drawn out death, and you’re not particularly a fan. As resilient and stubborn as you are, you are only so strong. 

Besides, you do not see poetry in dying as you have been living for the past six years, waking up one day and wanting your best friend; you know by now that there is no heroism in drawn out suffering. 

Months later you will be lying on a table. Your mouth will be sandpaper and your eyes will be burning. A man with glasses like twin moons will lean over and ask what you know of pain. Do you like pain, Sergeant Barnes? Are you experienced with it? Can you bear it? You will spit in his face, tell him that there are worse things than this. Worse pains, worse aches, worse tortures. You swear to God and Country and breathe violence at them like your mouthy best friend taught you to. The bastards can carve you down to your base structure all they want, but they won’t get anything from you. Nothing. You’ll fight. You will  _fight_. You won’t let them ever break you.

The United States Army will call you a hero for your suffering. They will shake your hand and commend you for your bravery. They will laude you as a true fighter.

That is a lie, of course. All it took was five minutes on that table before you screamed and sobbed for death.

It will not be the last time.

\----

You are twenty six years old and you are a dead man walking.

Steve finds you strapped to a table, an assemblage of needle prick pain and you’re sure you are dead when he kneels over you, everything unfamiliar but the blue of his eyes and the kindness of his mouth. He lifts you like a ragdoll, like the sum of your parts is light, meaningless, holds no weight to him.

You ache to touch him, sweep your hands over the part in his hair and the stronger angle of his jaw but this is a battlefield. So you grab a gun and swap affection for vengeance and you take out anyone who stands as a threat to a man who doesn’t look like he has threats anymore.

You are back at Steve Rogers’ side, but everything is wrong, it is all wrong. 

The return to base camp drops you into a fairy tale where you are the forgotten plot device, some fucked up glass slipper or half bitten apple left behind and not mentioned again. You are the afterword to the happy ending, and you stumble back into Steve’s life with full knowledge that you don’t belong there.

Once upon a time simply being with Steve would have been enough to fix you, but the man that rescues you from the HYDRA base—for he is a man, no longer a boy—is not your best friend. He gives orders with confidence and compassion, only now people listen in a way they never did before.  He talks smack like your Steve and he is gentle like your Steve and he is beautiful like your Steve, but no longer in a way that belongs solely to you.

Captain America, they call him. The star spangled man with a plan.

“Let’s hear it for Captain America!” You shout, proud as punch and feeling like your rib cage is collapsing.

You had always been able to say that you belonged at Steve’s side, and nowhere else, because he has always needed you and that was more than fine by you.

But now, he’s Captain America. Now, there’s Peggy Carter.

She’s got a bright laugh and a sharp eye and could charm all of the soldiers as soon as shoot them. Her lips are painted stars-and-stripes red and she’s beautiful and were she a man you would probably find an excuse to fight her.

Steve looks at her like she’s the only solid thing in a world of ghosts.

As it is, you cannot bring yourself to hate her because you know that she—like you—saw Steve and loved Steve before anyone else did. Peggy Carter is the dame you made your life’s mission to find for your best friend.  They deserve each other, and you could not be happier and sadder about that fact.

You feel the swell of a black hole in your chest as you wonder, now that he is bigger, so much more noticeable in a world that wants nothing but trouble, how are you supposed to protect him now?

“I’m following him,” you say, to no one’s surprise. Because you may not be able to protect him entirely, but you’re starting to get that running away from him most often works in the opposite of your favor.

You will not tell him that you were offered leave, honorable discharge from the United States Army and medals to boot. You will not tell him that there is an ache in your gut for the muggy slummy streets of Brooklyn, for bird bones where there is now brawn, for an artist where there is now a soldier. You will not leave; you will not even consider it. You stay, because when you were six years old you carried a bleeding boy out of an alleyway and you don’t think you ever really stopped carrying him.

Even when he didn’t need you anymore.

You stay because this is a war, and you are a soldier.

(You stay because the worst thing to ever happen to you wouldn’t happen to  _you_ ; it would happen to him.)

You’d promised him once in a darkened room that you would never let go. He’d have to be the one to do it.

That promise will crop up time and time again, when you sleep a tent’s length away from him, when you huddle for warmth besides him in a hole in the ground, when you pick off living things just so he can walk forward without trouble. You won’t let go, can’t.

It will not be until you are dangling from a train, a sea of white below you, that you will realize that he’d never promised it back.

It’s hard to say just why you fall. Maybe he wasn’t quick enough, maybe you did let go in the end.  You fall, and all you can think is who’s gonna look after him now, who’s gonna make sure he’s okay, is he gonna be okay?

The earth rushes up to meet you, and you let it tear you apart, shattering you like glass. And it will, it will be the last time.

The last thing you ever did was hurt him.

And all you can think is thank God it’s me. Thank God it’s me, thank fucking God it’s me and not you.

But you will not hate him for it, not as long as you li---

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

_James Buchanan Barnes 32557038 James Buchanan Barnes 32557038 James Buchanan Barnes 32557038 James Buchanan Barnes 32557038 James Buchanan Barnes 32557038 Ja--_

You have died. You think. You’re no longer sure.

There is a weird in between state, you think you have died but your heart is pounding and your muscles are straining and you know you are feeling things. There is pressure all around, at the front of your skull in the back of your mouth, molding you like wet clay, making you into something.

You think your body feels lighter on your left side, off balance, but you stopped trying to look when they began to operate.

Years, decades may pass as they chip who you were away. You were once the whittler but you are now the whittled, a barren branch slowly stripped of itself, carved into an unknown identity. They try different methods, invent new technologies, you think a new science is created between the times that they take you in and out of your box, the steadfast tin soldier with the missing limb, left behind by his army. Only you are not tossed into a fire, but a freezer, time and time again.

You resist it, everything they do, for a while. You hold on to humanity, to James Buchanan Barnes 32557038, to a face with blue eyes, blond hair and a smile like stars, to memory.

But you have long learned that half the battles you have and will fight were never meant to be won.

Like clay, there’s no substance in you, so all it takes is the right amount of pressure to take what you hold dear, they say. The right amount of voltage, they say. The right amount of agonizing pain, you know.

_James Buchanan Barnes 32557038_

You are a horror story, a Frankenstein made of cogs and whirring parts that Do. Not. Fit. There are feelings, sensations at the tips of your fingers (half human half machine) just out of reach. There are sounds (pencil on paper), tastes (raspberries) that you think you might keep to yourself, for enjoyment, and peace, but they are not yours. You are told as such.

_James Buchanan Barnes_

But what is mine? You ask. Is anything mine?

_Bucky Barnes_

(It will not be until the fourth time they wipe you and the fifth time they drown you that you stop asking for something that is yours)

_Bucky_

((It will not be until the third time they freeze you that you realize you never deserved it anyway))

\----

You are reborn from soldered metal and ash in a basement. Any parts of you that might speak to age or identification are frozen down to a serial number and how much time has passed since you last killed.

First mission: a little boy, holding his mother’s hand as he toddles down the street. Instructions: kill the child. They do not tell you why, and at some point you think you stopped asking.

You kill, simply because killing is the only thing that does feel familiar to you, as if taking lives was written out in your genetic code.

A rose blooms on this boy’s chest when you pull the trigger. He gurgles, scarlet bubbles on his mouth, staring up at hemorrhaging skies as his Mother screams.

Fine work, they say to themselves, sipping dark wine and you’re the prize fucking stallion. The weapon is fully functional. Fine work indeed.

Your existence is a game of fifty-two pickup, only the playing cards are bodies and pulses, and you’re the King of Hearts. You flick through the deck, a list of names and faces, all meaningless; a President with a wife in a pink suit, an inventor with a mustache whose last word is ‘Tony’, a man with dark skin who Dreamed a Dream, all meaningless, all just cards to be tossed away.

Your world is never seen but through a haze of blood.

\----

You are a thousand years old, it feels. You have no name.

You are not a fighter. You are an attack dog. A weapon. An asset.

You are bound to a mother country whose flag flies like a wave of red white and blue that never seems to sit right with you—wrong shapes wrong pattern—but you don’t know loyalty to anything but the name you are given at the beginning of each assignment, the singular file with orders to terminate and leave no traces behind.

You steal, you lie, you kill, you melt in and out of time, diffusing like poison through cells, slipping in between regimes and governments to pick off people from the herd. Your comfort lies in the crosshairs of a sniper that seem burned into your retinas and in sleeping on cold cement floors. If there is a part of you that wants, that burns, that bleeds, you either ignore it, or you forgot about it a long time ago.

You are standing on a bridge, all things around you in ruin. There are people screaming and running and things that are on fire and you have eyes only for the man who is staring at you, in awe, in horror.

(You will wonder, after you drag his body from a river, when you stopped being the thing that chased after monsters, and became the monster itself.)

“Bucky?”

And you feel, in this moment, that you are looking down at a boy and that this boy is sad and in your gut you know that you aren’t supposed to be attacking him.

But ‘Bucky’ is a made up word, a fragment you do not recognize or know and when you kill this man--as you kill all men that you are assigned to, because he is the mission and you always complete your missions--you will feel no different about it than you have the others.

“Who the hell is Bucky?”

Soldiers surround the two of you and he sinks to his knees, a gun pressed to his head, brought down by a man who is not bigger but is meaner, and your fist clenches with how much you want to beat the soldier’s face in for holding a gun to that head. He looks up at you, that boy, eyes blue as open skies and every inch of your programming is short circuiting with a feeling that hasn’t stirred in years. His willing surrender is an image that sits in your mind like a picture frame hung askew on a wall; the boy should be fighting.

He’s supposed to always be fighting.

You can’t recall ever wanting to protect a single thing in your life, not even your own skin, but right now you want to tell this boy to fight, or fight for him, slaughter every sonofabitch that comes near.

Returning to command feels like returning to the dog house. You did not succeed, and you are going to hurt for it.

When you ask who the man on the bridge was, they tell you he’s the enemy.

“But I knew him.” You tell Pierce and the scientists, sadness saccharine on your tongue.

They shut you up with a rubber gag, for this sadness and this recollection are not yours to have.

But you knew him.

They strap your words and your body down to a chair that smells like old pennies and piss, for these words and this body are not yours either.

But you knew him. You feel that you knew every inch of this boy, from the blood on his mouth to the angles of his bones when he came down from a punch.

You knew him, but that is inconsequential, for they wipe you clean, so that all you know is the blood on your own mouth when you bite through your cheek and the angles of your own bones as you bend, break and writhe on this chair. If Bucky was a name of significance once upon a time, it is not now, because the only name you know, will ever be allowed to know, is misery. Misery, an old friend woven into your screams; raw nerves and open wounds.

You can only hope that the man on the bridge doesn’t know Misery as well as you do. 

\----

You are neither here nor there. Your name is  ~~the Asset the Winter Soldier James Buchanan Bucky Sergeant Barnes Bucky Jerk Bucky~~

You don’t know who you are anymore. All you know is that you are bleeding, everywhere. Memory leaks out of your orifices. You are more liquid than man, and no matter how many layers you put on yourself you are freezing. Freezing and bleeding. Blood on snow.

You dream about cardinals and sling shots and little boys with roses blooming on their chests. You wake up more exhausted than you felt before you close your eyes. You move up and down the Eastern Seaboard like a current along a lightning rod, and you know that he’s following you, and you don’t care.

Fitting in this world is not even a consideration because you move too fast for that, leaving trails of yourself, searching for a place to belong. But there’s nothing, because the only home you remember clearly is a box in a fridge that makes you wretch until you’re empty, until you’ve burned them all to the ground. You want to go home, you feel that yearning shove at your skin, scrape at your sides, claw at your lungs. 

You eat when you get dizzy and you sleep when your limbs tremble but other than that, you run. You run and you hide and you bleed out all over places you think you might know, sullying memories with the crunch of your boots and the reflection of your arm. You haunt torn down apartment buildings in Brooklyn and abandoned Army Bases in New Jersey, a ghost intruding on someone else’s life.

If this is living, then you kind of want to stop. No one wants to hear a broken record glitch and malfunction on repeat. No one wants a loaded gun that won’t shoot.

No one wants a good for nothing kid from Brooklyn with no name and no face.

He catches up to you eventually.

(You let him.)

On the top of a building that would have once been called a skyscraper, now paled in comparison to the towers in, where you are chasing your own picture show of the boy’s birthday—Steve, you know by now, his name is Steve—and fireworks on a rainy fourth of July. You sit on the edge of the building, feet dangling over a busy street. This isn’t the same Brooklyn. It moved on, without you.

As did everything else.

“What’re you doin’ Buck?”

Bucky. That’s supposed to be your name. You bite the inside of your cheek until the skin breaks like it’ll provide the answer.

Truth be told, you don’t even know what you are doing, for the simple fact that there is no one to pull your trigger, to use and discard you.

“The fall wouldn’t kill me.” You say flatly, ignoring his question and watching a pollution haze over a city you can’t even recognize from memory. “Don’t worry about me swan diving.”

He stands wordless, waiting, keeping distance.

Why is he here, when you have nothing to offer but a deck of bloody cards and every single promise that you broke? What could he possibly have to gain from you other than revenge, surely revenge, for the best friend that you let Them kill, wipe and freeze away until there was just you, only you.

You wonder for just a second, what would happen if you killed him, because you know he’d let you. You know this, without explanation; like you are realizing that you know so many things that you weren’t supposed to. You could kill him, one quick snap of neck, maybe a few punctures to the lungs just to be thorough. Would you feel the remorse?

The lines of his body are familiar and you know that he is a threat, but that is alongside the notion that that body once lifted you out of hell, brought you to sunlight.

You don’t care about him, but you think that you would miss him, this stranger with earnest eyes and a gentle voice. You don’t care, but the idea of him gone leaves you feeling oddly hollow, like the absence of another limb. Killing him would rid you of the fact that you’re supposed to be something beyond Violence. But killing him would also render you out of place forever, with no connection to any sense of who you might’ve once been, of who you could’ve once been.

Who you might be now.

“How’d you find this place?” He asks, clambering out onto the stoop and sitting next to you. “We once watched fireworks out here while it was raining, you remember? I think I was thirteen.”

You close your eyes and feel cloying rain soaking you through, see lights bursting up above, a small child whooping beside you. There is another sensation, a subtle tug in your gut, deeper than your nerves and instinct, unsettling. You’re too tired to question what it means.

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

He doesn’t answer. Your head hurts. The two of you watch a city neither of you seem to recognize, twelve feet of seventy years between bodies that used to sleep back to back in your bedroom.

“It’s funny. Because I just want to go home,” you look up at him, bitterness in your mouth, “I don’t have a home, do I?”

(You do. You always have. It’s just that no one taught you that homes could be boys with blue eyes instead of buildings with bricks.)

“No Bucky. You don’t.” A name that isn’t yours is offered to you like a gift, and you turn away from it. You wish you had the will to fight him, the will to fight yourself, but exhaustion leaves you barren of inclination to action, so you sit.

“We could find you a new one,” he says after a moment, voice almost drowned out by city. “How does that sound?”

He offers a hand out to you, and you blink at it, recalling an alleyway and a bloody nose and having to look down to see the boy who’d picked a fight with the biggest bully in school.

Something tells you were not supposed to let go in the first place. You decline the hand, but follow him regardless, because this man seems to make up more of who you are, who you were, than you ever did. You make yourself small as possible, bite back shivers and hunger pangs in case he changes his mind and decides you aren’t worth saving after all.

Steve Rogers, the computers and archives had told you. Captain America, the super soldier who saved the world, the star spangled man with the plan.

Steve Rogers--who has more important messes to clean up than the scattered ashes of a tin soldier--never once lets you drop back and become his shadow. 

\----

You are thirty years old (or so the scientists tell you) and your name is Bucky Barnes (or so the history books quote you as being named).

They tell you the slate is clean. That you can start fresh, take new first steps and new first everything. It is not a concept you seem to understand, ‘first’, because you are almost a hundred years old from the day you were born, and your ‘firsts’ were used up in a smattering of years measured by how many fights you didn’t want to get into but did anyhow.

A man with an eye patch and a voice like the crack of a whip tells you that you have a fresh start. But the only ever ‘start’ you have known is the beginning of a race across a school ground playground, the commencement of a battalion drill, a mission. You do not know ‘start’ without direction.

So you stay with Steve. Because you know in your bones that the rest of the world will not believe in this so called fresh start for Bucky Barnes. You’re not sure you believe it either.

Time was once meaningless to you but now you are aware of it constantly; minutes days and hours and months since you remembered yourself, remembered other people. It’s all fragments that you can’t make sense of, shards of glass that you are trying to put together with cut and stinging fingers.

Keeping track of time from day one of Fresh Start is what keeps you aware, able discern one day to the next. You used to count in bodies. Now you count the things you can recognize with perfect clarity, a small but growing pile.

\----

You are thirty and four months and twenty seven days when you join forces with the Avengers.

The dictionary tells you that to avenge is to inflict harm in return for an injury or wrong doing. You think that you are very tired of being told that fighting is the only way you can help the world.

\----

You are thirty and five months and three days the first time you save a life in this century. The group is scattered on the Northern side of Staten Island and you lift a woman from a charred building. Her skin is shining and raw with burns, and she thanks you so profusely that you spend the night in the bathroom, staring at your face in the mirror and wondering why nothing stares back, why you can’t see what the woman saw.

Sometimes you feel like you are bleeding openly, wounds on display for a critical world to scrutinize. You see red everywhere, on your hands when you open your eyes in the dark (nightmares are more frequent than not), in the shock of hair that is present at every training session (Natasha is the only one that doesn’t go easy on you, you hope she knows how much you appreciate that). You see red in the news reels and article clippings, death tolls and body counts (Your ledger will never be clean, no matter how many you save), you see it in a country struggling for breath in an ocean of blood (its not the first empire you’ve seen fall, you just hope you can postpone it for as long as possible). It’s all over the team, from the rust metal of Iron Man to the cape of a God.

You find it difficult to reconcile the blood you have spilt with the blood you are now preventing from spilling, even more so because you know they’re watching you. You are a superhero now, they tell you, and they help in what ways they can. The only one who doesn’t overtly offer to help is Steve, who always has your back, just as you have his, but doesn’t seem frantically determined to make you fit as everyone else is. He answers your questions and he corrects your assumptions and he’ll even quip back at your sarcasm, much to everyone else’s surprise. Steve irks and comforts you in all the ways that count, despite that you’re not quite sure  _why_   they could, but you gradually change your time meter from lives you have saved to things Steve does, or says.

The first time you startle a laugh out of him is the best day of that entire week.

Still, the nightmares continue, your own panic attacks pulling you up from the dredges of much needed sleep. Nighttime pulls a cloak over your eyes that feels a lot like a locked hatch over the outside world, and despite being in top physical condition you exist on a schedule of catnaps on Steve’s couch that progress to catnaps on Steve’s bed. You think if he minds, he’ll say something, and to the pleasure of the bizarre tug in your gut, he never does.

Sometimes he’ll make a joke or pass you a small smile and you realize that there are words you have swallowed, words that you don’t think you’ll ever be able to get past the seventy years lodged in your throat. He sees you, and half the time your nightmares are based on the simple worry of you wearing your heart on your sleeve just as plain as the Star on your arm. But your identity and sense of self are anything if not a trainwreck, so for now you can be content with the fact that Steve Rogers makes you still, calms parts that rattle and rustle in the corners of your chest. You don’t really know what that means, you just know that it’s the one thing that’s keeping you from busting apart in your worst moments.

You start doing jigsaw puzzles. Bruce says they relax him, and you’re gradually discovering that Bruce is right about most things. You enjoy the soft click of a piece fitting into place, and it gives you something to do other than sleeping. You started small at first, but insomnia is a large beast to keep at bay, and Bruce only had a few hundred piece ones in his closet. Your request for more puzzles is acquitted by Tony, who thought it would be incredibly funny to order nearly fifty puzzles, all somehow related to Norman Rockwell and Wartime Propaganda.

Tony’s an ass, but he has his moments.

You can’t sleep. This is not new.

“How many this time?”

Steve pads out to join you from his room, hair mussed, some innate sense dragging him from sleep so he can stick close to you. You once believed that wherever he goes, you follow, but you are starting to learn that most things involving you and Steve tend to work both ways. This is not new either.

“Fifteen hundred.” Click. Click. Rotate. Click.

“Can I join you?”

You shrug. Rotate. Rotate. Click. Rotate. “It’s a free country, thanks to the likes of you.”

You win a chuckle with that, consider it today’s victory, much more so than other battles fought and won.

He crosses his legs on the other side of the table, and if his ankles brush yours, neither of you mentions it. He watches you, careful, always so careful. You used to be the one afraid of breaking him. You wish the tables hadn’t turned so violently.

You wish you could take care of each other. That sits on your shoulders heavy.

The sketchpad appears from out of nowhere, one minute Steve is watching you finish off the leftmost corner, the next he is drawing, pencil sweeping over the paper. It’s the only thing that could possibly make you look away from the puzzle itself.

And that, the image of Steve sitting just so, is familiar, strikes a chord in you that hits almost on knowing, because it is a position you have seen him take up a million lifetimes ago.

But you say nothing.

You work on the puzzle, the two of you forming a symphony of rotates and clicks and scratch of pencil on paper. You don’t ask what he’s drawing, but you are more than aware of the way his eyes flick over you every few minutes.

Curiosity gets the better of you, and when you put the final most piece into place, you look up.

“Can I see?” You ask.

Steve freezes, and if you compare what memories you have side by side, you know that he will say no, because Steve is honest but he’s not open. If he was, he isn’t anymore.

But when he silently slips the sketchbook over the table, you think that maybe some things really have changed.

It is a singular sketch of a man, resembling your body and form. A man comprised of sharp lines, dark shading, jagged punctures on the cut of his jaw, the chinks of his metal arm. He looks harsh. The space below his brow is void, soft impressions that could be closed, or looking down. It’s impossible to tell what this man looks like, what he’s feeling, who he is. 

“I don’t have a face.”

Steve shrugs. “Kind of hard to capture unless you’re looking right at me, Buck. And you have a habit of not doing that.”

You know this. You dodge his gaze like a game of tag, always darting away, finding a distraction just north or south of his gaze. You’re so terrified of what you might see reflected in his eyes. Steve’s got your whole life locked behind his lips and you see it every time you look at him, and you know that if you asked, he’d give it all to you, every detail and finer memory that you’re too cowardly to seek for yourself.

So when you push the sketchbook into his unsuspecting hands, it’s almost a plea. You want Steve to build you up, create something out of your own self-destruction that was promised from the day you sat in a kitchen and whittled on a stick because you yourself were never good at creating. You want him to give you a face that is recognizable beyond this maw of violence that has become all you know about yourself.

You silently place your hands in your lap, force your eyes up.

Looking at him is immediately the most exhausting thing you have done in months. You have dealt with mistrust and suspicion, with outright stares and nervous glances, and they have been meaningless in the face of your acceptance: you deserve all of it and more. But Steve looks at you with something akin to fondness, a concept that you have no explanation for because you did nothing to make him look at you like that in the first place. Yet here he is, legs crossed, eyes patient, mouth kind. His trust is unsettling, but you bare your gaze, stare at him as if the answers to all questions are pouring from his charcoal pencil to paper.

You remember that his hand used to be dwarfed by the pencil, that the sketchpad once upon a time covered his entire lap instead of one thigh. You remember these details, not so much cold microbursts knocking you over as they are flashes of sunlight, and you feel one of the icicles in the cave of your chest melt down and fall, shattering in a puddle of warmth.

When he returns the sketch to you, you’re almost disappointed at the results the second time around. You don’t mean to be. It’s just...“What the hell is that?”

“That’s you.” Steve answers.

“Okay, sure, but what the hell is  _that_?” You point at the drawing, around the muddled corners of your mouth. This is not your face, not a chance in the world. 

“You were frowning at first. But then you smiled, towards the end, so I changed it.” He says, wryly. “Dunno what you found so amusing.”

You stare down, cradling the sketchpad in your hands. The upward turned corners of your mouth reveal straight white teeth, the smile traveling towards your eyes and it is not a face that you know, but it is one that he knows.

The notion that you were once a person who smiled is something that Steve gave to you, knowingly or unknowingly and when you look at him again, the unexplained need hitches a little bit higher in your chest, kicking you just beneath the heart.

“You let me know when you want me to work on the rest.” Steve offers gently, walking to his room and closing the door.

You stare once more at the paper, grey lips curved, edge of stubble dotted on the bottom lip.

It is not you. But it is a start.

\----

You are thirty years and five months and ten days.

You allow Steve Rogers to rebuild you, sew back together your pieces with lead and a spiral notebook, night after night after night. You piece together a puzzle, and he pieces back together Bucky Barnes. You have long stopped trusting yourself to get the job done, and so it’s easier to let Steve sit down, to look right at him, and let him do the stitching.

You fight, sometimes kill, during the day, never alone, but still hurting with the weight of it. But for all that hurt you are thankfully allowed the tranquility of late nights with puzzles, and the man on the bridge.

The longer you look on Steve, the more you recall of who you once were. He gives you one part of yourself each time, and with that part comes a memory. You don’t bring up the memories, you don’t know how. Voicing things like these to Steve might clue him in, get him excited, hopeful in you. And you’ve let him down far too much to even attempt it again.

The sight of your eyebrows, drawn together in the middle, wrinkle in the joint, comes with the recollection of cussing out Susan Snipes in front of a classroom, stalking out with Steve’s hand in yours. Your nose reminds you of how your mother smelled, apples and flour. The stubborn set of your jaw recalls the first time you punched a boy in the face, mouthing off to Mickey Gladstone like you weren’t half his size. When Steve draws your shoulders, you remember cocking your head back and knocking a bird from the skies. When Steve draws the crease of your elbows, you remember barreling into his bedroom, sick with yourself. Your hands remind you of darkness, of staring at a ceiling and gripping those belonging to a dying boy, praying for forgiveness and promising to never harm again.

Steve finishes your mouth, and you remember licking raspberry off a shoulder and waking up so hard you couldn’t see straight.

Night by night the two of you play Scheherazade, weaving one thousand and one tales into a likeness that bears your name.

You don’t talk about the memories you retain, the ways in which they hurt, but Steve is either careful not to add tears to the drawing, or he simply does not notice them.

And as you remember, you think about a lot of things. You think about violence, you think about things that are broken. You think about the want in your gut, you think of all the people you defied to get to this place here, across from the smallest boy inside the largest hero. When Steve finishes each time, the two of you convene for breakfast at three, four, sometimes five am, and you sleep like a rock on your respective side of the bed and try not to wonder if this is a life you could continue to live in. 

\----

You are thirty years old and six months and seventeen days when the final product is passed over to you, Steve looking almost nervous as he does so.

The person who stares off the page at you looks almost peaceful. He has scars, but underneath those scars is a face you somehow recognize. Your eyes are clear, shadows clouding underneath, a product of the nightmares. You aren’t smiling in this particular drawing, but something about the set of your bottom lip speaks to serenity, washing over your heart like ocean waters over a stone, smoothing you out. You are a person drawn up of experiences, of thoughts and emotions, no longer body counts and bullets.

This face is yours, and yours alone.

You should say something, you have to say something. He needs to know about the way your pulse is racing and your throat is tightening. How you want to run at him and away from him all at once.

Steve may know and protect you better than anyone, but you have never been one for words and though you speak soft your heart has only ever been loud, passion making a racket in the cage of your chest for too long. You’re not sure what would come out if you were to try and speak up. 

You don’t know how to thank him. You will never know. But when you look up at him, smiling with your whole body, you think Steve gets the idea anyway.

So you start piecing together Steve in turn.

You are no artist yourself, but you have always enjoyed the bird’s eye view, so you watch Steve through your retina crosshairs and analyze him whenever you get the chance, in between and during missions, in the late night hours when he joins you to draw, in the rush out the door to save the world.

He gets raspberry jam to stock the fridge. You know it’s for you because he’s got a well used can of grape as well. But the raspberry is always there, and he always replenishes just before it run out. Steve exists in small gestures of kindness that are more familiar to you than anything else in your current world. His hair always sticks up on one side first thing in the morning after he wakes up. He always wears socks on the kitchen tile, and you remember that his feet were always perpetually cold from poor circulation, and apparently still are. Steve used to love bananas but he won’t go near them in the midst of the fruit bowl now. He adds sugar to everything he possibly can. Except for coffee, which he keeps to a simple cream additive. You match memories to motor function, notices that he still curls up when he draws, even though his limbs are long and actually sprawl. He still defends the helpless. People, everyone, gravitates towards him, and they listen to him. He still pinks with embarrassment when Natasha or Sam tease him, but he’s never without a backhanded retort to shut them down just as quickly.

He makes room for you in this life, in this world, includes you with a pointedness that lets you know you are welcome. He keeps his space, and you are always the first to approach, but as the weeks drag on you find that you want him to break that agreement. You wish for the invasion of your space more than ever before, but Steve’s not giving unless you ask him to.

You worry you won’t ever get the words out.

\----

You are thirty years old and eight months old when you finally figure it out.

It’s three am, and you’re sitting at the kitchen table with your latest puzzle. Steve walks by you, the socks on his feet silent over the tile, and you bite your cheek to hide your smile; he’d been asleep all of ten minutes ago. The naked skin of his chest would usually silence you entirely, but in the haze of three am and not having slept in a solid twenty three hours or so, it’s less of a shock to your system and more of a comfort, that he feels this relaxed around you.

“Another nightmare?” He asks gently, opening the fridge door.

You wince at the cold, nodding, and he closes it with a sharp snap. He doesn’t ask, and you don’t answer. Instead, he removes the loaf of Wonder Bread with practiced movements, putting two slices in the toaster and getting out the jam, same as usual. The silence settles over the two of you like a blanket, and you shift a few other of the pieces around; click, click, rotate, click, and listen to Steve puttering around the kitchen, drying the last few dishes in the sink. He takes the toast out lazily, practiced routine of unscrewing the jar, and it’s as he swirls the knife around the jar, that you see it.

The cloister of freckles on the jut of his shoulder blade.

One minute you’re holding back a yawn, bleary eyed and bending, and the next your yawn is frozen in your mouth, and you are pulled in two directions: want driving you forward, caution making you stay.

His back is to you, and he’s smearing a piece of toast red with raspberry and you think this is a scene you’ve lived before; second verse, same as the first.

For you don’t know what to call the sensation in your gut, looking at Steve. Your vocabulary and sense of self are comprised of two different centuries, and most of the time, you’re still not sure which one you’re living in. You yourself are missing pieces, you might never be complete. There isn’t a name to describe it quite yet on your tongue, because you don’t know what the thing is in the first place.

You were never going to say anything. You couldn’t ever say anything. But the year is 2015. You have survived wars, death itself. You overcame the loss of your own life and you’ve saved the world as much as you have hurt it.

You rise and cross the space of the kitchen and you think, if you can claw and clamber and get this little piece of happiness, then maybe you can keep it.

His skin is warm when you put your lips against it, freckles pressed to your mouth. And it is familiar, all at once. This is skin that you once hungrily licked and then jokingly bit. This is skin that grew bloody and bruised in alleyways, that you swore to protect at all costs. Skin that once broke so easily but is now strong, almost invincible. This is skin that you have hurt, held, bled for, died for.

You’re both here, existing in the same world and time. Despite everything, you’re here. It shouldn’t be so simple, but in the end, it really is.

Steve stills, fiddles with the jam jar, fingers idle by the lid.

You are not sure you trust yourself to breathe, let alone remove your lips from his person; it seems to be the only thing rooting you to the spot, the only part of Steve Rogers that you got a chance to kiss before they broke and rebirthed you. For all you know, you’re playing out fantasies while locked in a cryo-tube.

When you step back, slow, and he faces you, you look him straight in the eye, meeting wide blue eyes and seeing your own want reflected back at you, a mirror of nearly a century. You are sure to let him see your eyes, to let him scrape away at the final shards of dirty glass that’s obscured a raw substance, frothing in you since you first started picking fights in the streets of Brooklyn.

You have never been a fighter, but now you fight tooth and nail, battling away a lifetime’s worth of blood and swallowed words. You are tired, have been awake for far too long, but you tilt your chin up and you look him square in the eye, a challenge and a question and a  _fight_  all in one.

And you are so, so still.

“Oh.” He breathes out in a rush, against your mouth, surprise pinking in his cheeks.

You’re not sure when you started shaking, but you only notice when he does it too.

Steve nods, slowly, mouth brushing your temple. “Okay. I—okay.”

There is a moment, as you breathe each other’s air, where you think he’ll backtrack, rewind the play which you have set in motion. He pulls back slightly, lips quirking, and you know just like that that the conversation is far from over. Not even close. Your heart trips over itself, and even with sleep prodding at your eyes with itchy fingers you know without a doubt you will follow wherever he leads this next, till the end.

He turns to leave, you follow. There is all the usual pretense of getting ready for bed, of sleeping on opposite sides of the same mattress like you have been doing for weeks, bodies forming opposing parenthesis that do not touch. He brushes his teeth and you wash your face and the two of you are quiet, comfortable with all the time in the world.

It does not feel like you are teetering on the edge of a cliff, but maybe that’s because you had resigned yourself to falling long ago, oblivion in the midst of loving and living for the best person you’ve ever known. Sleep plucks at your muscles, moving you sluggishly around the bathroom, maneuvering you precariously into the bedroom, keeping you close to Steve always.

You crawl into bed, and the empty space between your bodies feels like Brooklyn all over again when Steve rolls onto his side. Though you don’t touch, your limbs complement one another, and were you closer, you’re sure that you’d notch together just so; rotate, rotate, click.  

You like that your story leads to here, body hungry, heart hungrier, feeling for the first time in ninety years that you can breathe. The war ended years ago, but only now does it feel like you are coming home.

You have gotten used to sleeping, taking naps as opposed to the standard eight hours of rest, so you do just that, exhaustion knocking you out into clear undisturbed slumber down until the sun rises, familiar across the cut of his cheeks and the swoop of his eyelashes.

Steve’s still there when you wake, even after all this time.

He lifts his hand to your face. “Can I—“

The angle is off kilter and you’re not sure you will ever get used to looking  _up_  to do this, but you kiss him just the same. And it is not eager or desperate it just…it is. Inertia, gravity, simple fact.

 You rise to the occasion and he meets you blow for blow, looking down as you are looking up and when you collide, you crash, words and confessions and clichés not part of this story. Words never felt necessary, for your heart is his, always has been.

There is no huge earth shattering realization to be had because you are here, and you have lived through a thousand years, a thousand lifetimes, a thousand shades of red, to get to this point. But it is not the victory lap you had considered, nor the disappointment you had feared. It just is, solid undeniable fact that you are here, in this bed, kissing Steve Rogers, his knees clocking against your knees and his toes still cold as they press against your calves. In all your guiltiest dreams you had never imagined the simplicity of it, had never pictured a world in which Steve was not made to be swept off his feet in some grand romantic gesture. A world where the basic whole of you was somehow worthy.  A world where Steve was inevitable as the rising sun spreading over your skin. Kissing Steve feels inevitable. Not even predestination or fate, because inevitability came before that too and no one could have predicted that in any one lifetime he would choose you.

The two of you fall into each other and you are inevitable. Steve, is inevitable. You want to apologize for not knowing, never knowing, but the mere movement of his lips against yours steals those apologies and delivers them back in spades for reasons you have never discussed, but have all the time in the world to dismiss away.

He presses his thumbs to your skin. “I didn’t know.”

And he didn’t, how could he? You, who have spent ages six through ninety seven wearing a mask over your eyes.

Steve knows nothing about you, is not a grownup in all the ways that you had thought at six years old, watching a skinny boy with dainty fists and a stubborn face.

His fists are not dainty against the small of your back, but that’s not the important part (it never was). That steel, solid resolve to not budge an inch, resides in such an identical version to your memory that your face aches with the size of your smile.

You feel your age and your name settle in the marrow of you in a way they never did before. For the first time since breaking Mickey Gladstone’s nose in a Brooklyn alleyway, there’s a chance you might have a place in this world, after all.

Your memories and recollections might not be entirely clear but the second he kisses back, you are absolutely sure that if this isn’t happiness, then it doesn’t exist.

And you are not a grownup, you might never be. But you think you could teach Steve Rogers a thing or two.

\----

You are thirty one years old. Your name is Bucky.

You fit.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> dimpleforyourthoughts: [tumblr](http://dimpleforyourthoughts.tumblr.com/) / [twitter](https://twitter.com/dimpled_trash)  
> my [ko-fi account](http://ko-fi.com/A33648QC)  
> 


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